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There is nothing I wanted more than to drop in today with a Marvel Monday review, but life keeps getting in the way and there was simply no time this past week for me to prepare any content. It sucks, especially since this is my best source of therapy and I’m really missing it. It doesn’t help that my backlog of Marvel Legends is going from out of hand to just plain ridiculous.

And it’s not just Marvel Legends. I have NECA figures, Transformers, Hasbro’s new Overwatch Ultimates, Prize Figures and some Sixth Scale stuff all piling up just waiting to be opened and explored. My Toy Closet is back to the point where I can’t even walk into it anymore. And my den is surrounded by stacks of comics waiting to be matriculated into long boxes. I’d say it’s been all work and no play, but I did manage to eek out the time to see Avengers: Endgame, which was like a tiny miracle in itself. And I say that not just because the movie was great, but because I actually found the means and occasion to see it.

Anywho, my goal is to try to get a couple of reviews up this week, one of which will be the Marvel Legends review that would have gone up today if I had had the time to finish it. And by finish it, I mean actually open a figure, write the review, photograph it, do the editing and post it. I’ll try to get one up on Wednesday and another on Friday, but with my life the way it is, I can’t make any promises.

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What began nearly six months ago as some minor renovations has since turned into prime material for Builders From Hell. Back on the week of Thanksgiving, the property management here embarked on a well intentioned crusade to improve the property, which included total renovations to the outside and installing new windows. After a Week of Hell the new windows finally went in, but they left the inside of the new windows unfinished. THAT WAS FIVE MONTHS AGO!!!

They’ve only now come back to redo the frames and that meant I had to pack everything up in my studio, including a sizable piece of my collection to avoid any collateral damage. Most of the work is done, but they still have to come back and paint after the foundation dries. That’s either going to be tomorrow or Thursday. I’ve got enough stuff going on with an erratic work schedule this week (I’ll be pulling at least one overnight), so rather than stress over it, I’m taking the rest of the week off from creating new content.

Hopefully I’ll get everything back together on Saturday and I’ll be able to at least sneak a couple of this week’s planned Features in on the weekend and then get back to business as usual on Monday!

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That pesky thing called “Real Life” continues to intrude on my blogging efforts. I had hoped things would be back to normal this week, but I’ll have to indulge your patience for just one week more. I’m hoping this will be the last of my 60+ hour work weeks for a little while and the contractors are wrapping up the heavy work on my home, so I should have my studio re-assembled by this weekend. Rather than return with sporadic content, I’ve just decided to declare this week a wash out and return to regular Monday through Friday content starting next Monday.

Thanks for your patience!

FigureFan

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So after being delayed for nearly two months, renovations at the FFZ homestead are going full guns this week. Thanks, contractors! Thanksgiving week was the perfect week to start this shit! You seriously couldn’t have waited until after the Holiday?

Anyway, my studio is still torn apart. I had to take down my light box. And a good deal of my collection is blocked off because I had to move furniture around until the contractors are done. They took out one of my windows at 8am on Thursday morning and didn’t replace it until 4pm. I spent most of the day sitting at the window with my SKS across my lap trying to deter looters.

On the flipside, we’re coming into what is traditionally one of the worst weeks of the year for me at work so the fact that my home is torn apart isn’t making it any better. I worked 26 hours in the last two days and this was supposed to be my weekend off! I will not have a day away from work again until next Friday. Hey, I gotta pay for all this shit somehow!

Sooooo… Despite all that, I’m still working at getting back to regular content on Monday. I had hoped to do Hot Toys’ RoboCop for today, but it just didn’t happen. I’d still like to get to him this week, even if it means less features for the week. But we’ll see. I’ll definitely have something up for Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. Thursday I’m taking off and then we’ll see how the rest of the week goes after that.

In the meantime, the Index of Reviews is creeping toward 1,300 reviews! So if you’re missing out on your daily dose of reading posts from some middle aged alcoholic idiot rambling on about toys, don’t forget to poke around in there until I can resume regular scheduled posts.

Yer Pal,

FigureFan.

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So, I know what some people are thinking. “Hey, FigureFan, where’s the review for Big Chief’s 11th Doctor figure? What, you got monies for the Milla Jovoviches but no scratch for the good Doctor? WTF?”

Yes, it’s true; I’ve had two hundred bucks squirreled away for almost three months waiting for the launch of Big Chief’s first figure: Matt Smith as the 11th Doc. The early proto shots of the figure looked great, but I still had quite a bit of trepidation over dropping two hundred dollars on the purchase. Big Chief is an untried company and no one actually had any hands-on time with a finished version of the figure. So, a pre-order was out, but I planned on buying it once pictures of the final product surfaced. It eventually became available from a few sources and I was all ready to do it, when a poster threw up a slew of pictures on one of the Who collecting forums that I frequent. Alas, those pictures were just enough to knock me off the fence in favor of not buying him.

Keep in mind, the poster was very happy with the figure, and I still think the likeness and the quality of the figure itself were solid enough. But in the end, it was the tailoring on the outfit that swayed me. The shirt collar looked all puffy and would not stay down, the bowtie was a mess, and that’s not cool! Messy bowties are not cool. The jacket didn’t seem to fit the figure very well and there were loose threads everywhere. I’ve since seen photos of the outfit looking much better, but the owner of those photos confessed to spending a lot of time fussing in order to get the outfit looking acceptable.

I wanted to buy this thing. I really did. If it were $150 I probably would have. But if I’m blowing two hundred bones on a figure, I have to be totally happy with it right out of the box. I want to applaud what Big Chief is doing with the license and I really wanted to support them in their endeavors, but the final version of this figure just wasn’t where it needed to be for me to justify the purchase. So, there you have it. A number of retailers that I frequent still have plenty on hand, so there is a possibility he’ll become available at a sale price and possibly that will make me bite. I’m not saying I wouldn’t be happy with him, but I just can’t take the gamble at that price. I’m still probably willing to go for him in the $150 neighborhood, but until then don’t expect to see him featured here anytime soon.

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Several months ago, I started making Vintage Vault a regular scheduled update because, a) I was sorting through tubs and had a lot of my old stuff available, and b) There was absolutely nothing new coming in for me to look at. Well, it’s been a fun ride and it’s served its purpose, I’ve been through most of the M.A.S.K., Sectaurs, and AD&D stuff that I have in storage and now there’s a lot of new stuff coming in on a regular basis. Those of you who enjoyed it will be happy to know it’ll still be popping up from time to time, and I can always bring it back as a regular when I need it again. Those of you who didn’t give a shit will be happy to know I’m putting it back on the shelf.

I was actually going to try to get one more in today, but then the UPS guy dropped the Perfect Storm of stuff off on my stoop and I figured I should get started before I get buried.

And, yes… I will be back a little later on with some actual content.

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So, I usually like to keep my commitments, but M.A.S.K. Monday is going to be pushed back to Wednesday this week due to some unforseen circumstances (ie. my camera blowing up). I was going to dig out my spare, but I’m getting called in to work to take care of some business. All this, just when I thought I got a new update schedule hammered out, but as they say, “it never rains, but it pours.”

I’ll still do my best to get three updates in this week.

Christ, I hate Mondays.

-FigureFan

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Starting this week, I’m cutting back updates to just three times a week: Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. I will continue to do Vintage Vault on Monday and Friday, for the next two weeks, at which time the planned number of Monday M.A.S.K. editions will have wrapped up and I will just be doing VV on Fridays. There will still be about three weeks’ worth of AD&D installments and after that it will rotate to different toy lines.

The cutbacks aren’t because I’ve lost any passion for doing this nonsense, but because I just don’t have that steady inrush of figures and toys to look at. If it weren’t for pulling out my really old stuff for the Vintage Vault featues, I would have had to resort to this a long time ago. Toss in the fact that I’m now doing the jobs of two managers at my work, the daily updates are too much right now. Maintaining a daily update schedule takes a lot of work, but without new stuff to look at, and having to dig through storage to find stuff to look at, it just becomes too time consuming for me to keep up with.

Eventually, I’ll be back to more frequent updates. The dry spell can’t last forever, and we have some really cool stuff coming out in 3rd and 4th Quarter of 2012. But for the time being, I think cutting back is the best thing I can do to maintain some consistancy for FigureFan and my own sanity. I’m not sure that I’ll ever get back to a daily routine, but Monday through Friday is a happy medium that I’d like to shoot for.

As always, thanks for reading, and I’ll be back tomorrow…

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Well, not really, but I am going out of town this week starting tomorrow. I should be back early enough on Friday to get some content up before the end of the week, but in the interim Figurefan will be closed from Tuesday to Thursday.

I may also be skipping town for the weekend too, but that remains to be seen. Either way, I’ll try to get back to business as usual by next week.

-FigureFan

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Yep, it’s Sunday so I’m taking the day off. Its been a grueling week at work and I’ve got a nice three-day weekend as the payoff. As you read this, I am curled up in a whiskey bottle with a jerry-rigged, steam-driven VCR playing a marathon of slightly garbled old episodes of Bionic Six. A possibility for future installments of VIntage Vault? Hmm… could be…

I might try to get up to Toys R Us this weekend and see if I can find anything new on the pegs because it has been a long time since I’ve found anything current that’s worth buying. On that note, my Voltron Yellow Lion and Hunk figure should be coming in any day now, so we have that to look forward to next week, along with the usual M.A.S.K. and AD&D editions of Vintage Vault, another Marvel Universe Comic Pack, some more Doctor Who, and whatever I can find to fill the gap in between.